Claude for Zotero: Working With References and Research Notes

There is no official integration between Claude and Zotero. The most reliable approach is exporting your Zotero library or a collection in a standard format — BibTeX, RIS, or CSL JSON — and bringing that into Claude for analysis, literature mapping, or writing assistance. Tools like fenbs retain the selected source links, research decisions, and open questions that come out of the analysis, separate from the Zotero library itself.

A critical rule applies to any AI-assisted work with references: verify every citation against the original source before using it. Claude can confidently present a citation detail it has inferred or misread. The original paper or source is the authority, not the AI's summary of it.

Exporting from Zotero for Claude

In Zotero, select the items or collection you want to work with. Right-click and choose Export Items (or Export Collection from the collection menu). Three formats work well with Claude:

• BibTeX: a widely used format that includes title, authors, year, journal, and abstract when available. Paste the exported text directly into a Claude conversation.
• RIS: a standard bibliography format similar to BibTeX. Good for export and import between reference managers.
• CSL JSON: a structured JSON format. More complete than BibTeX for some fields. Claude reads it well when pasted or uploaded.

Export only the items relevant to your current question. A library of thousands of references pasted in full will exceed Claude's context window and produce less useful results than a focused selection of thirty to fifty relevant papers.

What Claude can do with exported references

With an exported reference list, Claude can help you:

• Map the relationships between sources: "Which papers in this list build on each other? Which represent competing positions?"
• Identify gaps: "What do these sources cover? What questions do they leave open?"
• Summarize a set of abstracts to give you a quick orientation before reading.
• Suggest how to group sources into themes for a literature review.
• Draft in-text citations in a specified style, using the reference data you provided.

Claude cannot access the full text of papers through Zotero. If you have PDFs attached to your Zotero items, upload the specific PDFs to Claude.ai for deeper analysis of individual papers.

Analyzing specific papers with Claude

For individual papers you want to analyze in depth, upload the PDF directly to Claude.ai. Export the PDF from Zotero (right-click the item and choose Save File), then attach it to a conversation. Ask Claude to summarize the methodology, identify the key findings, explain the limitations, or compare it to another paper you upload in the same conversation.

When analyzing methodology or interpreting findings, Claude does well at explaining what the authors did and what they claim. It does less well at independent assessment of whether the methods are sound for the research question — that judgment requires your own expertise or peer review. Use Claude to understand the paper more quickly, not to assess it for you.

Verifying citations before using them

When Claude drafts citations or makes claims about a source, check the original. AI models can hallucinate citation details — wrong page numbers, misattributed quotes, incorrect publication years — especially when working from bibliographic data rather than full text. The risk increases when Claude is asked to infer a claim rather than extract a stated fact.

A practical check: for every citation Claude produces that will appear in a final document, look up the source in Zotero, open it, and confirm the specific detail being cited. This takes thirty seconds per citation and catches errors before they reach a reader.

For claim verification: find the passage in the paper that supports the claim Claude attributed to it. If the paper does not contain that support, the citation is wrong regardless of how confidently Claude stated it. See claude API for more on building verification steps into Claude workflows.

Retaining research decisions and open questions

A research project accumulates decisions: which sources to include, what claims need more evidence, how to resolve a contradiction between papers. Those decisions are easy to lose across sessions if they exist only in chat history.

Recording them in fenbs as Decisions and rules or context notes — "Source X included; Source Y excluded because it predates the relevant policy change" — gives the next session the same starting point. The open questions become tasks. The source links point back to Zotero. See how it works.

How to do this with fenbs

fenbs does not connect to Zotero. It holds the research decisions and selected source references outside the Zotero library, where any connected AI assistant can read them at the start of the next session.

1. Create a free account. Add a project for your research topic or paper.
2. Export the relevant Zotero collection as BibTeX or CSL JSON. Bring it to Claude and ask your research question.
3. Review Claude's output against your Zotero library. Verify every specific claim or citation detail against the original source.
4. Add confirmed decisions to fenbs as Decisions and rules. Add open questions as tasks. Link to the Zotero sources they came from.
5. Connect a supported AI app from Integrations. The next research session reads your decisions and open questions without re-processing the full reference list.